It's not enough to be correct by coincidence, process matters. We see this often enough in scientific papers where the statistics come into question. News process is different, especially given how sources work. Not everyone is willing to be recorded, and recordings are increasingly untrustworthy anyway, so at some point you have to start believing that the reporter heard person X say Y.
The worst part of the whole fake news fiasco has been people using the (very real) problems of the established media as an excuse to switch to consuming total nonsense from fabricated sources.
Interestingly, time itself is a social construct. Not just in the sense of relativistic time, but in the sense of how we came to move from individual local clocks ("decentralised time") to using time from the communication network which had to coordinate internally ("railway time").
Indeed they are, and in no small measure because everyone is convinced that they know what clocks do and nearly everyone is wrong. Everyone thinks that clocks measure time. They don't. They measure the space-time interval between events, but when you try to explain that to people their eyes glaze over and they start mentally fitting you for a nice padded cell. But this actually matters if, for example, you want to understand the details of how GPS works.
Fake news is the same way. Most of the time it really doesn't matter, e.g. the person working the register at the grocery store can believe that aliens have kidnapped their pet hamster and it won't impact their ability to ring up your order. So most people go through life believing crazy things it never matters, until when it finally does their thought processes are so deeply entrenched that the actual truth sounds completely insane to them (c.f. "clocks don't measure time.")
Is truth really constant though? The answer would probably depend on the domain being considered. Many things change over time and truth can change with them. So perhaps the core problem is that multiple contradictory “truths” can exist depending on ones point of view and ones point in time.
This would be separate from intentional misinformation which does tie into the debate. It seems likely that the modern problem of multiple clocks could just be a representation of different points of view.
Not that people generally verified that much anyway, but if it comes from people we trust and like we probably don't engage natural scepticism. Not like you might if you doubted the source, or heard a wild claim on the news. The friend has become the source, and reinforced the veracity. The sharing model did that. It probably also explains the amplification effects of social.
So I suppose the meta question is did they pick a side, or was it picked by the random connections within the peer group?
But the systems optimize for positive interactions (which generates eyeballs/pageview/ad impressions). So even if a dozen friends dismissed something, correctly, that one dumb Shitposter will get the word accross and the sytem will benefit the thumbs up with a zero effort propagation (one click) versus the critic (time to sit down, write an argument, work to have that thumbsuped... or o HN: create an account years in the past, acumulates karma just so you can downvote things that are actually wrong).
the incentives are the problem (advertising) not presence of wrong content amidst good content.
A friend might retweet on Twitter content they were dismissive about, but that retweet would sometimes accidentally legitimize that content by removing the dismissive context (spreading it away in readers' timelines).
Similar with FB showing you stuff friends react to or comment on; their reactions might be Anger and their comments critical, but that context also is still partly lost if you weren't looking for it, and sometimes intentionally whitewashed ("x friends reacted to this" instead of "10 friends hate this, but one kind of liked it"), in the maelstrom of the FB timeline algorithm. (Obviously the worst case on FB up until recently was how easy it was for people to whitewash paid ads by resharing them, losing the context of who paid to promote that content in the first place.)
In fact, if you get a bunch of people who, say, want to get up a bit later, they can band together to set their time deliberately wrong and influence as many people as they can to synchronise with their incorrect time (whilst all along pretending it is the correct time), and soon it becomes hard to know which groups are telling everyone the correct time, and which groups are disseminating the wrong time to achieve their political ends...
People do exactly this with clocks, too. If I had one clock reading 9:10 pm and one reading 1:45pm, and I just had lunch, I'd assume the second one was right rather than look for a third source.
Are you sure the correct time isn't just someone declaring their clock is the correct time and everyone else's clock is relative to theirs?
At what point does this metaphor wear too thin?
It’s a group of clocks claiming time is significantly off and that the “other clock group” is the wrong bunch.
That gets very convincing quickly.
However, it seems more and more people are skipping that verification step, and just assuming the clock is right. When presented with two conflicting clocks, instead of questioning what's going on and trying to find another clock to verify current time, they pick a side, rejecting one of the clocks as "fake" and continue using the one that most aligns with what they think the time should be.